Conventional techniques for selecting a user interface that is not currently exposed on a display are often confusing, take up valuable display space, cannot be universally applied across different devices, or provide a poor user experience.
Some conventional techniques, for example, enable selection of a user interface through onscreen controls in a task bar, within a floating window, or on a window frame. These onscreen controls, however, take up valuable display real estate and can annoy users by requiring users to find and select the correct control.
Some other conventional techniques enable selection of a user interface through hardware, such as hot keys and buttons. At best these techniques require users to remember what key, key combination, or hardware button to select. Even in this best case users often accidentally select keys or buttons. Further, in many cases hardware-selection techniques cannot be universally applied, as hardware on computing devices can vary by device model, generation, vendor, or manufacturer. In such cases either the techniques will not work or work differently across different computing devices. This exacerbates the problem of users needing to remember the correct hardware, as many users have multiple devices, and so may need to remember different hardware selections for different devices. Further still, for many computing devices hardware selection forces users to engage a computing device outside the user's normal flow of interaction, such as when a touch-screen device requires a user to change his or her mental and physical orientation from display-based interactions to hardware-based interactions.